SuperVision

Images of the Technological Sublime

The reception of X rays during the first few years after their discovery
in late 1895 provides a rich instance of the technological sublime.
Wilhelm Conrad von Röntgen’s discovery of X rays on 8 November 1895
marked an apogee of the nineteenth century’s triumphalist valuation of
vision. The images of previously invisible interiors, whether of living
bodies or of inanimate objects were the culmination of a steadily
growing belief in the medical community that vision was the supreme
sense for diagnosis.1 The reaction to this discovery was
extraordinary; in the year 1896 alone over fifty books and pamphlets and
well over a thousand papers were published on the subject.2 X rays
were welcomed as an extension of humanity’s ongoing progress, its
conquest of yet another frontier. And this progressive flavor quickly
became imparted to all manner of unlikely products—X-ray headache
tablets, X-ray stove polish, even X-ray juice presses.

As cinema historian Yuri Tsivian has argued, X rays, along with the
microscope and cinema, participated in a rhetoric of “penetrating
vision,” offering images that ran the risk of showing too much.3
Indeed, the fantasies surrounding X rays clustered around fears about
privacy, from such peculiar artifacts as laws forbidding the use of
X-ray opera glasses and manufacturers hawking lead-lined underwear, to
beliefs that X rays would allow viewers to see other kinds of invisible
domains, such as thought, which was at the root of beliefs in X-ray
telepathy. Anxieties mounted about how the vision of the future would
permit rampant indiscretion. More generally, X rays demonstrate how
visions of the future are often tied to notions of future vision, i.e.,
transformations in perception brought about by technological change.
Seeing into the future frequently involved a change in how we might see.

An early trick film, The X Rays (1897), uses the new
technology to satirize romantic conventions.4 Here a photographer
with a device labeled “X Rays” transforms a scene of comic romance by
showing the courting couple as a pair of skeletons. The withering gaze
of the X rays reveals the vanity of the flesh as a farce. A darker shade
of this trope finds an articulation in George Griffith’s “A Photograph
of the Invisible,” in which a certain young Denton has been thrown over
by his beloved, Edith.5 His friend, Professor Grantham, a chemist and
physical investigator by profession, but with an interest in photography
as well, promises him “revenge that shall be purely scientific, beyond
the reach of all human law, and I think I may say, absolutely
unique.”6 The men concoct a scheme to punish Edith that revolves
around producing an X-ray image of her. When she receives the image, it
has a spectralizing effect on her: “Neither of them said anything when
they first saw what was underneath, but the blood rushed to his face
till it was almost purple, and died out of hers till it was grey and
white and ghastly—the face of a corpse, but for the two bright, glaring
eyes that stared out of it.” Edith’s husband is struck down by a nervous
malady, and she ends up in a private insane asylum, morbidly
photophobic.

Like any visual prosthesis, X rays threw the limits of human vision into
stark relief. As Linda Henderson has emphasized in her work on the
reception of X rays by the avant garde, “these invisible rays . . .
clearly established the inadequacy of human sense perception and raised
fundamental questions about the nature of matter itself.”7 A
particularly prominent aspect of X rays was their “thanatographic”
qualities, making the ends of the human visible in an image of
death.8 Even more than had photographs, X rays troubled the boundary
between living bodies and inanimate objects.

C. H. T. Crosthwaite’s “Roentgen’s Curse,” (1896) offers another vivid
document of the ambivalent reception of Röntgen’s discovery. Near the
beginning of the story, the narrator and protagonist, a former
bacteriologist and analytical chemist, now retired thanks to an
inheritance, and recently back from India where he had been involved in
the “chase after the cholera microbe” introduces his tale: “I was on the
track of a great discovery. I was sure of it. A little more time, a
little more toil, and the reward would be mine. I, Herbert Newton,
should be hailed as the greatest benefactor of the human race in modern
times.” (469) Newton succeeds in inventing a fluid that when applied to
the eyes gives the user the ability to see with X-ray vision.

Newton tests the fluid on his dog, and the dog goes insane. This rather
arch moment of foreshadowing is lost on Newton, however, who proceeds to
administer the liquid to his own eyes. When his wife and son visit him,
he regrets his decision. “I dared for one moment to look again, and in
that one moment I suffered enough to make me regret for ever the
ambition to see with the Divine eye. Two living skeletons walked in, the
larger leading the little one by the hand; two chattering, gibbering
skeletons. . . Oh God! How terrible! There at my knee was a little
skeleton, mouthing at me and aping the motions of life. I closed my eyes
again, and my tongue refused to speak.”9 Newton is brought to the
edge of madness and total collapse before the effects of the fluid wear
off and he returns to the bliss of normal, limited vision.10

Edmond Hamilton’s “The Man with X-Ray Eyes” (1933) similarly emphasizes
the personal costs of increased knowledge.11 The story’s protagonist,
David Winn, is a journalist who implores Dr. Jackson Homer to test his
new advance on him, which will render inorganic matter invisible. He
believes this type of vision will allow him to “get stories no other
reporter can get,” in part thanks to his newly acquired skill of
lip-reading. The scene in which Winn sees differently for the first time
underlines the metaphorical payload that the enhanced view carries,
however: “It came to Winn as he emerged into the street that his new
eyesight gave him more than the power to look through walls—it gave with
it the power to look through the falsities of ordinary existence into
the true hearts of men.”12 His insights into the meetings of
politicians and industrialists, the inner workings of a prison, a
hospital, and an “insanity-hospital” evoke “revulsion” and disgust. The
“grotesque spectacle of the city” overwhelms him, and the images of
unhappiness begin to threaten his wellbeing:

In his soul, a horror was expanding that he could not conquer…. He was
sick, sick unto his soul. Why, he cried to himself, had he ever been
so mad as to let his eyes be changed? Why had he not realized what it
would mean? All the wretchedness and wrong-doing and horror of life
that was hidden from other men by walls would always be staring him in
the face. He would see them always with eyes that penetrated all
concealment.13

Society’s pervasive rottenness strikes him most powerfully when he
realizes that even his fiancé is concealing her true feelings about him.

The story concludes with Dr. Homer at the morgue, where he identifies
David’s body. David’s pose in death is telling: “He lay with body
tensed, and with one hand flung palm-outward against his face, across
his eyes.”14 Dr. Homer’s interpretation of this gesture encapsulates
the recurring anxiety surrounding these tales of enhanced vision: “He
was trying to keep from seeing everything. For he saw everything just as
he wanted to, and it was too much for him. God keep us blind to this
world! Prevent us from the horror of doing what he did, of seeing too
well.”15

This turn away from enhanced vision accorded on the one hand with a
conservative form of technophobia, a call to ignore certain kinds of
knowledge in favor of the status quo. But this doubt about the benefits
of progress also constituted a critique of triumphalist valuations of
technically enhanced vision. As yesterday’s X-ray fantasies became
increasingly realized in various surveillant techniques, yesterday’s
skeptical responses can seem surprisingly prescient.

As a media historian, I am particularly interested in how mass culture
registers ambivalence surrounding new technologies of vision. My use of
the “sublime” designates conceptions of overwhelming media experiences,
where technologies extend the human sensorium into new environments that
reveal exciting and sometimes terrifying vistas.16 This essay’s
consideration of a selection of stories that register an anxious
reception of the X ray will be extended in subsequent contributions,
where I will take up the microscope, the telescope, and the
ophthalmoscope, drawing on examples from both cinema and literature.

See Stanley Joel Reiser, Medicine and the Reign of Technology
(London: Cambridge University Press, 1978). ↩

For a selection of responses to the discovery of X rays, see Otto
Glasser, Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen and the Early History of the
Röntgen Rays (London: Bale and Danielsson, 1933). ↩

Yuri Tsivian, “Media Fantasies and Penetrating Vision: Some Links
Between X-Rays, the Microscope, and Film,” in Laboratory of Dreams:
The Russian Avant-Garde and Cultural Experiment, ed. John E. Bowlt
and Olga Matich (Stanford, CA.: Stanford University Press, 1996),
81-99. Tsivian notes that the thematization of the X ray’s
penetrating gaze in early cinema often belonged to a de Lorde Grand
Guignol tradition that emphasized the terrors of technology. See
also Tom Gunning, “Heard over the Phone: The Lonely Villa and the
de Lorde Tradition of the Terrors of Technology,” Screen 32/2
(1991): 184-96. ↩

G. A. Smith, The X Rays (1897), British Film Institute National
Archive. ↩

Griffith, “A Photograph,” 376. Grantham further describes himself
as, “Not a photographer in the ordinary sense of the word, but
rather an excursionist in the outer and least known realms of
science” (378), listing “chromatic photography,” spirit photography,
and a form of Galtonesque composite photography as belonging to his
interests. ↩

Linda Dalrymple Henderson, “X Rays and the Quest for Invisible
Reality in the Art of Kupka, Duchamp, and the Cubists,” Art
Journal 47/4 (1988): 324. ↩

Crosthwaite, “Röntgen’s Curse,” 475-7. While a prominent mode of
reception surrounding early cinema figured it as a way of conquering
death because of its ability to preserve an image of motion,
particularly the image of loved ones in motion, there was another
current of reaction to the first exhibitions, one of unease, and the
uncanny reactions to X rays are related to this other of the
vivifying gaze. For the best examples of the uncanny reaction to
early cinema, see Maxim Gorky, “The Kingdom of Shadows,” and O.
Winter, “The Cinematographe.” ↩

In a subsequent post, I will elaborate on how X—The Man with the
X‑ray Eyes (Roger Corman, 1963) recapitulates many of the motifs
from Crosthwaite’s story. ↩

Ibid., 69. An anecdote about a supposedly “lost” final shot of
X-The Man with the X Ray Eyes, where Xavier, after his
self-enucleation, cries, “I can still see!” offers a similar image
of overwhelming, inextinguishable, vision. ↩

Also useful for me here is Carolyn Marvin’s concept of a “media
fantasy,” a cultural projection of possibilities cast upon emergent
media; see Carolyn Marvin, When Old Technologies Were New: Thinking
about Electric Communication in the Late Nineteenth Century (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1988). ↩